For me it’s all about the dissonance and I almost never listen to lyrics in any form of music and find it an annoyance. If there was a death or black metal musical, I wouldn’t like it probably, for example. The voice to me is another instrument that is no better or worse than other instruments but unique in that voices are obviously much more varied than an instrument is.

But I think it’s worth getting a survey of some sort from folks into metal seriously. We’ve already shown that metal fans are among the most dedicated listeners of a genre, for example, according to Spotify’s stats. The Metal Maniacs BB more than a decade ago did an informal survey among the members and found that at least in that crew most metal fans are pretty darn introverted, which is a finding that most people not into the music and cliques would be surprised by. That board may be up on the Wayback machine but maybe it’s be of some value to researchers.

The self-report aspects of a study are handy enough for the purpose of identifying further research if you have no clue what to investigate next at least.